Fig. 6: Sicut Umbra, by Luigi Dallapicola (Extract. from Watkins, 1986); here, Dallapicola uses “the delicate tracery of the stars through a direct projection of maps of the night sky into musical figures (Watkins, 1986: 491)”. A preexistent abstraction adapted to melodic and harmonic content.
Most procedures implied in adapting sound or other elements to a musical language raise problems of different nature. Transcription, a highly common method of work, deals with the confrontation between an acoustic reality and a personal intellectual approach in order to obtain a final, filtered result –its encoding to a musical language is an abstract process and implies the loss of much information (Sloboda & Parker, 1985: 143‐4). A common usage of elements of Inscriptional nature through means of abstract adaptation is the Conversion of alphabet letters into pitch information (the B‐A‐C‐H theme, for instance); for instance, in is Chamber Concerto, Berg includes material deriving from the names of Schoenberg, Webern or his self, originating melodic themes (Pople, 1991: 18).
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